Worn down by London fog, computers and post-Diana exhaustion, Queen Elizabeth II takes an incognito train ride to Scotland in historian Kuhn’s debut novel. The trip turns Buckingham Palace upside down as loyal staff tries to keep the missing monarch out of the tabloids. Meanwhile, a little old lady in a black hoodie and a silk scarf teaches a bartender how to make a no-nonsense martini (“it doesn’t have to be shaken in the air to do the trick”); debates the tragedy of the shooting of the stag in the film “The Queen” (“those deer are pests”); and teaches a young Indian immigrant some yoga (“child’s pose”).

There Was a Country

A Personal History of Biafra

by Chinua Achebe (Penguin)

One of Africa’s best-known and respected authors, Achebe (“Things Fall Apart”) recalls the events of Nigeria’s horrific 1967-70 civil war. Starvation was used as a weapon by the Nigerian government against his Igbo people seeking independence. An estimated 3 million people died, many of them children. In one episode, after Achebe sent his family to safety, he returned to his Lagos office at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. There, his boss related how drunken soldiers had come, Achebe writes, “wanting to find out which was more powerful, their guns or my pen.”

The John Lennon Letters

edited by Hunter Davies (Little, Brown)

The ex-Beatle’s not around to pen what would surely be an interesting memoir, but Lennon fans can get a peek at his less public side through these nearly 400 pages of letters. One highlight: a 1971 broadside to Paul and Linda McCartney, likening them to a “middle age cranky Beatle fan.” But there’s also lots of fascinatingly mundane notes, such a 1979 shopping list in which he writes “search parties may be needed” to find Grape-Nuts and orange (honey) marmalade. Sounds like they could be song lyrics.

The Shadow Girls

by Henning Mankell (New Press)

Depressed Swedish cop Kurt Wallander is nowhere to be found in Mankell’s 2001 novel, just translated to English. Instead, we have fading poet Jepser Humlin, whose girlfriend is pining for a baby he doesn’t want. And now, his publisher wants a crime novel (of all things) he doesn’t want to write. While his mother, stockbroker and others decide to write his novel, Humlin gets caught up in the plight of refugees, teaching writing to three disparate girls.

Sacrifice Fly

by Tim O’Mara (St. Martin’s)

In New York City schoolteacher O’Mara’s debut novel, he writes what he knows. Brooklyn middle-school teacher Ray Donne is worried when one of his students — Frankie, a baseball player — misses a week of school. When he visits the boy’s father, all he finds is a corpse and the police. Donne used to be a cop, forced off the NYPD by injury and unimpressed by police efforts to find the missing kid (and his sister), he sets off on his own investigation. That leads to a wide array of characters and even another kidnapping — Donne’s own.